IRVINE : Silver Screen Dreams Tug at Writers in UCI Program

If UC Irvine instructor Linda Voorhees’ hunch is right, her students’ names may soon be appearing in letters 10 feet tall on the nation’s movie screens.

UCI is already well-known for producing novelists and short-story writers. Voorhees thinks the university has the potential to be famous for its screenwriters as well.

“Screenwriting is a passion for me. I live it every day,” said Voorhees, who teaches an advanced screenwriting class through the UCI Extension Program.

In the past, Voorhees said, students seriously interested in writing for the film industry traveled to Los Angeles to enroll at UCLA, internationally recognized for its screenwriting program. About 80% of members of the West Coast chapter of the Writers Guild of America are UCLA graduates.

UC Irvine officials saw an opportunity to tap into that market when Voorhees offered her first class last year. They expected fewer than a dozen to enroll; 36 signed up.

“I realized I had hit on something big. People were hungry to learn the craft,” said Voorhees, whose screenwriting credits include the feature film, “Crazy From the Heart.”

“Once they get that first door open, we know our students will be ready,” said Voorhees, who has a master’s in screenwriting from UCLA. “We are unapologetically taking from what work has come out of UCLA and applying it to UCI.”

A handful of colleges in the county also offer screenwriting courses, mostly introductory. But students say those programs are not comparable to UCLA’s because they don’t prepare a student to compete in Hollywood.

“This program offers individualized attention,” said Leslie Dallas, who had attended at least two of the local programs before enrolling in the UCI Extension program.

Colleges that offer introductory script writing courses often run as long as four months, which Voorhees said “is too much. It doesn’t push a writer forward. . . . Within 10 weeks a writer should have finished a first draft. That’s the industry standard. Deadline for any television network is four to five weeks.”

Tim Albaugh, also a product of UCLA’s masters program, teaches the beginning program, which includes the fundamentals of screenplays such as plot, character and conflict.

Voorhees teaches the advanced class, which has nine students this quarter. For the next session, she said she wants to add an eight-week class for the intermediate writer and to sponsor a writing contest. “The expectations are going to be very, very high,” she said.

To help young writers feel more comfortable in public, Voorhees is taking them to coffeehouses to read their work aloud, “talk shop, schmooze and talk about industry gossip,” she said. “We are preparing the students so that they are comfortable meeting with a director or a producer.”